Great fun...until they get to Manchester... (SPOILERS)

Rating: 8/10 (27 June 2003)

"28 Days Later" is not as good as "Trainspotting," but not as horrifically boring as "The Beach." 28DL is sort of a mishmash of the concepts of the three classic Romero "Dead" films - "Night of the Living Dead", "Dawn of the Dead", and "Day of the Dead". That doesn't mean it's bad, but like the Dead trilogy, it falls flat in the third act.
It has several scenes that echo Night's "zombie siege" mentality.
It uses Day and Dawn's post-apocalyptic feel (though, to be fair, lots of stuff is post-apocalyptic).
The most blatant similarity, however, is the entire theme of Day's whole military-self-implosion thing. The soldiers were just like the soldiers under Captain Rhodes...perhaps _too_ obviously so. Like Day, it had an overly happy ending (a killer for any zombie apocalypse flick). If the movie ended with no soldiers and no base, and the gang continued into the countryside, fighting infected and learning about themselves on the way, the movie would have been a classic.